Father and Son: The Relay of Life
A father and his grown son, holding hands. Behind them is what defines them; in front of them, the lens in all its merciless candor. Important photographs need no words. This Digital Story is as big as life itself. Because it takes us back to the most natural of cycles and offers its piercing gaze into meaning. The photographer Valeriy Poshtarov has two sons, aged 12 and 9. One morning, as he walks them to school, he starts thinking about how, before he knows it, the moment will come when they no longer want him to hold their hands. That is how the idea is born: to capture fathers and their grown sons in his lens, surrounded by the setting that represents them best. The result: photographs that don't just tell stories, they paint universes…
22“Armed with Art, We Are More Vigilant and Less Deceived”
Not the politician or the soldier but the artist is the one who should paint tomorrow. That is the great theme of a little-known British historian who, a decade ago, gathered a rare historical genre of text into one ambitious book: the manifesto. Alex Danchev had a distant Bulgarian connection, and with a fine eye and wide-ranging knowledge he assembled a puzzle of 100 twentieth-century manifestos. What might the manifesto of the future look like in the age of artificial intelligence? We'll get there, of course…
23Ten Analog Stories in Flight: Inside Rafaelo Kazakov's Photo Collection
Capturing the moment means something different now than it did in the days before TikTok. Or does it? These photographs will remind you why photography will outlive social networks.
24“Our Chance Is to Give Young People Know-How”
Did you know that a Bulgarian was deeply involved in making Finding Nemo, WALL-E and other cult animated films? Antoni Hristov’s story is even much more than that: he landed in Hollywood at just 20, spent 18 years as an art director at Pixar, crossed paths with Steve Jobs, and then came home to build ARC Academy, a school for visual arts. How does Hollywood look from here, and Sofia from over there, and what is the future of creativity at a time when technology throws down its great challenges?
25Santa Claus on the Kaval
What does it mean to be an eccentric today? Can fate smile on you when you swim against the current and the stereotypes? This digital story is about two people separated by several generations and united by their love of Bulgaria and its folklore: one eccentric who left a corporate career to devote himself to his beloved art tells us about the last years of another, a man who held dozens of characters inside him—musician, instrument maker, sage, priest and… even Santa Claus. Bogdan Darev directed the film Kaval Park, where for almost two hours he presents the surreal figure of Alexander Eppler, an American of Russian descent and a Bulgarian at heart.
26Takor Kyurdyan: The Artist of Archetypes
A remarkable master spends years searching for his own way to leave his gaze on photographic paper, and in the end he finds it: he coats his nude heroines in emulsion and “prints” them directly onto the paper. His unconventional approach and his photographic paintings, which become known as “archetypes,” own their era, and then seem to vanish, just as archetypes do. Today you will find almost nothing about him on the endless internet. Takor Kyurdyan died a quarter of a century ago, at only 51, and now his singular works are being reborn, dug out of time's memory by a young historian. It is time for a black-and-white digital story that brings together the fates of three men in a friendship beyond time.
27“Sometimes I’ll Come…”: How AI Illustrated 10 Classic Bulgarian Verses
What illustrations could artificial intelligence draw from the works of Botev, Debelyanov, Boris Hristov and Georgi Gospodinov, and how would image-generating algorithms interpret classic lines of Bulgarian literature? This kind of AI has been a hit in recent months, a striking example of what technology can already do, and it has given rise to a new skill: describing an image so precisely that the algorithm generates exactly what you expect. So what happens when we “feed” it the stanzas of proven masters? Here are the fascinating results!
28Sofia Opens the Door Between Generations
Eighteen-year-old Sofia Simeonova steps into the homes of her peers with her camera to show their most personal place—their own room. Her only condition is that it must not be tidied up for the photos, but look the way it does every day. “Almost every child subconsciously sees their room as the safest place. That is where they express their innermost thoughts and hopes most purely,” says Sofia. With her exhibition The Room in You, she quite literally opens the door between generations. So what does the most personal space of young people look like today?
29“The False Sense That Our Opinion Matters…”
Maestro Nayden Todorov is a world-class musician, but also an erudite man with a broad outlook and a distinctive view of technology and the way it changes us. Why does he believe our constant rush is a disease we must fight? How is the digital world pulling us away from our humanity, and why is art the only salvation? How did the maestro go 12 years without setting foot in an opera house, horrified by his first encounter with one? And why does he often run an experiment, going to an online forum to defend two opposite points of view in an attempt to escape the filter bubble?
30“AI Is Bringing a Revolution to Photography”
“Photography works with a high level of abstraction and metaphor. I didn’t expect software like this to exist any time soon, but it turns out I was very wrong,” says Ivaylo Petrov. The experienced photographer is among the first enthusiasts to get access to a new artificial intelligence which, he believes, has the power to revolutionize photography and the way we perceive the world. See the wonders the AI painted from the prompts Ivaylo gave it, and read why the photographer is so impressed by what it can do.
31DALL·E, Draw Me a Sheep!
This picture was created by an algorithm. “A tiger anxiously waiting for its dentist appointment,” read the instructions it was given. DALL·E certainly deserves serious attention. It may lack the waxed mustache and the eccentricity of its namesake Salvador, but it does thrilling things. With the help of artificial intelligence it turns a description into an image, and with such precision and creativity! The rest of the examples will leave you amazed…
32When the Orchestra, the Band and the DJ Start Playing…
Would you like to hear a song with a catchy melody, performed at the same time by a symphony orchestra, a rock band, a DJ and three singers, one for each of these styles? And what if you could add or mute every performer and every group of instruments? Wouldn’t the result be remarkably interesting? A thought-provoking metaphor for how easy it is to find the shared melody and build on it, even when at first glance we seem impossibly different. It is a fascinating digital experiment created by the composer Alexander Kostov, and it is worth hearing and seeing…
33“No Two Photographs Can Ever Be the Same”
Ot upor (Point Blank) is the title of Garo Keshishian's book. We meet the great master of photography to talk about life in pictures. “Pressing the shutter really is death. One man kills a rabbit, another kills a lion.” “Now everyone lifts a phone and snaps away. And once they've shot their kebapcheta, they think they've taken a photograph, because it's in focus.”
34Battle for Pixels: How 6,000,000 People Create Together
r/place. The Place project on the social network Reddit showed, all at once, that people can work together online for a beautiful idea; that social networks sometimes make sense; and that we can build wonderful messages when we come together.
35“Let’s Be Human. Let’s See Each Other, Talk, Dream…”
We all know Orlin Goranov as a singer, but lately he has proved himself, impressively, in a new role. At the height of the first COVID gloom he was asked to take on the hard job of hosting a TV show that would make people smile: The Last One Wins, an original quiz show that somehow provoked me into trying my luck too, with the result airing on Monday evening. On the show the host gave me a hard time with his questions; in return, I will try to provoke him with mine. How does he manage to stay away from social media? How do you keep a positive outlook in hard times? And when will technology become perfect at art?
36Hush! The Algorithm Is Dreaming…
How does artificial intelligence dream? Deep dreaming reveals what algorithms see before they “get the job done.” The result is magical and surreal, and could easily pass for the work of a human artist, because it peers beyond the visible and finds its own patterns, accents, nuances and stirring images in photos and paintings. Could this technology also help us understand more about how our own brains work…
37Draw Me… a T-Shirt
Narisuvai Mi (“Draw Me”) is a charming platform that can definitely help you stand out. Its founders bring together talented artists who hand-paint T-shirts, and for an affordable price you can order one made entirely to your own design, unlike anyone else's. One more thing: you still have a chance to win one of these original T-shirts with the Digital Stories logo. Here's how.
38The Past in the Future: The Legacy of Todor Slavchev
The whole Bulgarian 20th century is there. Tsar Boris III, Georgi Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov appear; the Bulgarian authorities are welcomed in Macedonia in the early 1940s, and soon after our soldiers storm the German lines; the People's Court and the first rallies of the 1990s are caught on film. The photographic archive of Todor Slavchev is a bottomless treasure trove that reaches us thanks to his granddaughter, Yana Uzunova. Enjoy these extraordinary pictures and read their remarkable story…
39The Bauhaus: When Technology Met Art
These days we have almost grown used to seeing technology and art as rivals, yet this story reminds us that when the two come together, the results can be astonishing. The Bauhaus was a school where both paths converged; it lasted only a handful of years at the start of the last century, but it left behind an entire movement in architecture and art. Its story comes to us from the past to teach us about the roads of the future…
40People of Sofia Against the Grayness and the Limbo
“Sofia today is a boring city to photograph,” says… Vihren Georgiev, the creator of the People of Sofia project. You may never have heard his name, but it would be strange if his remarkable photographs had never moved you. He is a wonderful photographer of the new, digital age, and his shots are at once art and a chronicle of the day. They win attention without running from the laws of art or chasing easy beauty. They simply show the people of Sofia as they are. Let me, in turn, try to present to you, as he is, the man who for almost a decade has been catching them in their true light.
